by Simon Hawke
Chili offered a joint to Vera, who was sitting between Chuck and Shelly in the rear of the van. “Sure, why not?” said Vera, taking it.
Shelly couldn’t take his eyes off her. Those shorts were so tight, they looked as if she had been poured into them and she was sitting with her legs spread . . . and her blouse was unbuttoned enough that if she leaned back, he could see . . .
When Vera turned and caught him staring down her blouse, Shelly quickly looked away. Now she probably really thinks I’m a jerk, he thought, angry with himself. He could never seem to do anything right. Hell, he thought, can you blame a guy for staring when a girl’s dressed like that? How can you not stare at anybody who’s so incredibly gorgeous? And she was supposed to be his date, too! A blind date, but still, he’d never had a date with anyone who looked like her. And he probably never would again, he thought miserably.
“Hey, let’s share the wealth with those less fortunate up front, huh?” said Andy.
Vera passed the joint and sat back down beside Shelly. Her gaze fell on the small black case where he kept his props and makeup. She looked up at him with curiosity. “What’ve you got in there?” she said.
“My whole world,” he said mysteriously.
“In that little thing?” said Vera, amused.
“Stick around,” said Shelly. “You’ll see.”
Vera shrugged and turned to look out the back window. She saw flashing red lights in the distance. They were coming up fast, and a second later she heard the sirens.
“It’s the cops!” she said.
“What?” said Debbie.
Chris glanced into her sideview mirror. “Oh,no!” she cried.
“Oh, my God!” said Chili.
“What’re you gonna do?” moaned Shelly, anxiously looking out the back window as the two police cars came up fast.
“Destroy the evidence!” said Vera, grabbing for the plastic bags.
Chuck snatched her. “No way, man!”
“Let go, Chuck,” Chili said. “Come on!”
It took a moment for it to sink in. Then he suddenly realized what would happen if they were pulled over with all that dope in their possession.
“We gotta get rid of it!” he cried, panicking as the sirens rapidly approached.
Andy grabbed a bag. “Eat it!” he said, stuffing some into his mouth.
They started stuffing the loose joints and the grass into their mouths, swallowing as quickly as they could. When Chuck realized that they were never going to get it all down in time, he tossed a bag to Vera, who started stuffing the grass into her mouth and swallowing as fast as she could.
“The cops are going to get us!” Shelly wailed. “We’re going to jail!”
Andy held a bag out to Chris.
She shook her head. “I’m driving.”
He turned to Debbie and held the bag out to her.
“No way!” she said emphatically. “We’re pregnant, remember?”
The police cars were almost on top of them. Chris kept glancing nervously into the sideview mirror.
“Faster, faster!” Chili said, chewing furiously and swallowing as quickly as she could. “You better step on it!”
Chris sped up, but the police cruisers kept on gaining.
Their cheeks were all stuffed to capacity.
“Faster! Eat faster!” Shelly cried.
“Come on, help us!” Vera said, handing him a fistful of grass. “Come on!”
“Uh . . . I guess I’m just not hungry,” Shelly said, grimacing with distatst and pulling back from her.
“You’re always hungry, Shelly!” Andy said, his mouth full. “Come on, eat!”
“Come on, hurry up!” said Vera.
“I’m allergic to pot!” Shelly shouted, furious that he was going to get busted because of them.
“They’re too close!” said Chris. “I gotta pull over!”
They all started cramming dope into their mouths as the van pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped.
The two police cruisers shot right past them without even slowing down.
For a second, they all stared out through the windshield with disbelief, and then they sighed with relief. A few seconds later, it occurred to them that they had eaten almost all of their stash.
“Oh, man!” moaned Chuck.
“Oh shit!” said Chili, trying to scrape together the grass they’d dropped onto the floor of the van.
Chris wondered where the police cars could possibly have been going that they had ignored her like that. She had been driving well over the speed limit, trying to buy the others some time to get rid of the dope. A few miles down the road, she had her answer.
To the left, there was a turnoff sloping downhill to a small roadside grocery store at the foot of the highway embankment. The police cruisers pulled in with screeching tires, and the officers jumped out of their cars and hurried over to the store.
“Okay, you guys, show’s over,” one of them said, beckoning the small group of people away from the store entrance. “Let’s move it back over here, all right?”
There was ambulance parked in front of the entrance to the market. Chris slowed down as the road followed the curve of the embankment so that they could look down as they passed and see what was going on. As they drove past the market, the ambulance attendants came out, carrying two stretchers with sheet-covered bodies strapped to them. Chris couldn’t take her eyes off the sight. She swerved sharply and snapped out of it, quickly returning her attention to the road.
“Hey kiddo,” said Debbie gently, seeing the expression on her fact, “don’t let your imagination run away with you.”
Chris swallowed hard, trying to calm down. Her nerves were already more than a bit on edge just at the though of coming back to Crystal Lake again. And now this . . .
“Chris, stop the van!” cried Debbie.
“What?” she said, startled, snapping out of her reverie. “What is it?”
“Stop!”
Chris slammed on the brakes.
She was not a moment too soon. The van screeched to a stop inches away from an old man lying in the center of the road.
“What are you doin’?” Andy said. “You almost ran over him!”
“I . . . I must have been daydreaming,” said Chris, shocked at what she almost did. “I didn’t even see him!”
They piled out of the van and approached the motionless figure. He was lying on his back in the middle of the road, his head pillowed on a duffle bag. It was a hell of a place to take a nap. He was in his late sixties or seventies, and had stringy gray hair and a long beard. He was as skinny as a rake, his old baggy clothes were badly in need of a washing and his face was covered by a beat-up straw hat. He didn’t move a muscle.
“Hey, man, he looks just like my grandfather!” said Chuck, bending over him.
They stood around the old man, looking down at him with concern. As their shadows fell across him, his eyes fluttered open.
“Why,” he said, looking at Debbie and Vera and speaking in a wheezy voice, “I must be in heaven!”
Chuck grinned. “What’re you doin’ down there, old guy?” he said.
“You all right?” Chris asked him in a worried tone.
“Get him up,” said Andy.
“Don’t touch him!” Shelly cautioned, keeping well back from the old man. “You don’t know where he’s been!”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the old man said as they helped him to his feet. “You are, indeed, all of you, kind and generous young people. Look upon what His Grace has brought me!”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a curious-looking, slimy, whitish object. His hand trembled as he held it out, directly under Shelly’s face.
Shelly winced, looking down at the disgusting looking object and wrinkling his nose. “What is that?” he said.
“I found this today,” the old man said, gravely. “There were other pieces of the body . . .”
“That’s an eyeball!” Shelly cried,
gasping and recoiling from the object.
“He wanted me to have this,” the old man said, showing them the eyeball and glaring at them wildly. “He wanted me to warn you!”
They rushed back toward the van and piled in as the old man staggered after them, brandishing the eyeball, his voice rising in pitch like an evangelical preacher’s.
“Look upon this omen!” he cried as Chris quickly started up the van and shifted into gear, pulling around him in a wide circle. “And go back from whence ye came!”
Chris floored it and the van shot down the road, leaving the old man in its dust.
“I have warned thee!” the old man shouted after them, waving the eyeball at the rapidly receding van. “I have warned thee!”
Chapter Two
The letters carved into the heavily weathered, swinging wooden sign mounted on a post by the packed earth driveway read HIGGINS HAVEN. The old lakeside vacation home was set in a grove of large oak trees that had been there long before the house was built. Their heavy branches hung low over the driveway. The weather-beaten farm house had an elevated porch and curtained windows. Unlike many of the homes in the area, it wasn’t a Victorian or New England style, but sort of a bastardized amalgamation of the two.
In front of the porch, there was a large, packed earth parking area where the drive curved around and ran over to the ancient barn, some thirty yards to the left and slightly to the rest of the house. There were bales of hay piled up in a penned-in area near the front of the barn and the window doors to the hayloft were open, displaying an old block and tackle for hoisting up bales.
About twenty-five yards to the right of the house was an old outhouse with a peaked roof and a traditional half-moon vent hole in the wooden door—a relic of time before the house had been equipped with modern plumbing. Past the outhouse and down a slight incline was the lakeshore where an old wooden boat dock jutted out some twenty feet over the water.
Chris turned into the entrance and drove over an ancient, loose-planked wooden bridge that spanned a dried-up streambed that curved around the house.
“Check it out!” yelled Andy as they turned into the driveway and approached the house.
Chris pulled the van up in front of the porch and stopped. They all jumped out and ran immediately down to the lake.
“Why don’t we take our bags into the house first?” Chris shouted after them, but like restless kids needing to release pent-up energy after a long car trip, they paid no attention to her. She shrugged and sighed.
“Chris! Come on down!” shouted Debbie from the dock.
Chris shook her head. “You go ahead,” she called to her. “I’m going to take my bags in the house first and look around”
Behind her, inside the house, someone parted the curtains slightly and looked out.
Chris turned back toward the house and the figure in the window disappeared. For a moment, she stood still, simply staring at the old place. It seemed like a long time. A very long time. Almost as if it had been another life. Then she took a deep breath, grabbed her duffel bag, and climbed the porch steps to the front door.
Her parents hadn’t wanted her to come here, nor did they want to come here anymore themselves. The kept talking about putting the old place on the market, but somehow they never got around to it, as if they simply didn’t want to deal with anything that touched it. As if what had happened to her was their problem.
Well, it wasn’t their problem, she thought bitterly. It was hers. What had happened had happened to her, not to them. They didn’t seem to understand that. She was the one who had to deal with it, one way or another. Avoiding it was not the answer. Your problems didn’t disappear if you ignored them. The only way that she could think of facing what had happened to her was to come back here and deal with it once and for all. Come back to Crystal Lake where the nightmare had begun.
She started to look for the keys to the front door and then noticed with surprise that the door was slightly ajar. She frowned. There wasn’t supposed to be anybody here.
“Hello?” she said uncertainly.
There was no response. Glancing over her shoulder toward the lake where her friends were, she hesitantly took hold of the doorknob and pushed open the door. It opened with a creak and she stepped inside.
With all the curtains drawn, the house was dark. Only the faint gleams of sunlight penetrated through the gaps in the faded window curtains, sending thin shafts of light across the floor.
“Is someone here?” she said nervously.
Suddenly she felt a hand grab her by the neck and yank her backward sharply. She gasped, opening her mouth to scream, but before she could, she was pinned against the wall and felt herself being kissed passionately. Opening her eyes wide, she broke the kiss, pulling back, and gave her “attacker” a hard shove.
“Rick!” she said, enormously relieved and yet at the same time really angry at being scared like that. She hadn’t expected to run into him here, at lease not this soon, but then she realized that he must have been working out in the barn, hauling in the hay, when they had driven up. Her father had obviously forgotten about stopping the delivery and Rick was just being helpful, trying to get it in before it rotted. He probably didn’t know that her family wasn’t coming this summer, that they were probably never coming back again. She had never told him about what happened, and as a result, there was no way he could have known what coming back here again meant to her.
“Is it just my imagination or did it just get cold in here?” said Rick, sounding disappointed.
Rick was a tall, attractive, well-built twenty-three-year-old with short dark hair and an easy smile. He was dressed in a plaid work shirt and jeans and he leaned against the wall, watching Chris uncertainly, the puzzled expression on his face saying he didn’t know what he had done wrong. She gave him an exasperated look and walked away from him, trying to collect herself.
“Did I do something wrong?” said Rick, coming toward her with a look of concern on his face.
She turned back to him with a sigh. “No . . . it’s just being here again,” she said, not sure how to make him understand. She really didn’t want to get into it now. She wasn’t ready for him. Not yet, it was too soon. “I know it’s only been a year,” she said, “but I feel like I’ve been away forever.”
Her gaze went around the room. “It doesn’t look like anything’s changed,” she said, sighing wistfully. “Even the paintings are still crooked.”
She went over to the wall and straightened one of the inexpensive landscape paintings. Her father had bought them at a “starving artists” warehouse sale, thinking he had found a real bargain, and later had found out that the “starving artists” were starving in Korea, where they were being paid slave wages to turn out hundreds of copies of the same landscape scenes for export.
“You’ve certainly changed,” said Rick, watching her, unable to understand her standoffishness. “Don’t you even say hello anymore?”
“I’m sorry,” Chris said, turned back to him. She forced a smile. “Hello, Rick. How are you?”
He smile uncertainly. “Well, that’s a start.”
He reached for her and bent down to kiss her once again, but she pulled back, retreating from him.
“Could you just slow down please?” she said. “There’s a whole weekend ahead of us. Let me get to know you again. Let me get to know this place again.”
“Okay,” said Rick, with a grin. “But there’s only just so many cold showers I can take.”
Chris rolled her eyes. “Come outside and help me with the bags,” she said.
Lighten up, Chris, she told herself. He doesn’t understand. How could he? A year ago this time, they had been discovering something really special together. They were starting to get serious and talking about the future in a way she hadn’t thought she’d be ready to discuss for a long time yet, and then her whole world caved in.
Rick didn’t have a clue about what happened. At her family’s request, it had been kept
out of the papers and she had never told him, never bothered to explain, because she couldn’t. She simply couldn’t. She had not been able to deal with it herself, how could she expect him to accept what had happened to her? She was afraid to tell him.
So far as he knew, she and her family had simply gone back home. He wrote her letters asking what happened, and she wrote back, pretending that something had come up at the last minute, something to do with her father’s business, and they had to leave at once; there had been no chance to say good-bye. They had kept in touch, but Rick was not much of a letter writer, and on the occasions when he called, she was either noncommittal or she pretended that she wasn’t home. He wasn’t stupid. He knew something was wrong, but he did not know what it was and he was trying to pick up where they had left off to recapture what they had last summer. She really wished they could, but no longer knew if it was possible.
Still, it’s not his fault, she told herself as they went outside. And she really was happy to see him. Maybe it would be easier with him around. Loosening up a little, she jumped laughing, onto his back and thew her arms around him as she preceeded her down the porch stairs.
“Ooof!” he grunted, exaggerating the strain as he carried her piggyback. “You know, Chris, I think you’ve gained some weight since last summer.”
“I have not!” she said, punching him playfully. “You creep! Put me down!”
He dropped her at the van. “Here,” he said, reaching up to untie the ropes holding down their gear and the canoe, “get the ones inside and I’ll get the ones on top.”
She went over to the side door of the van. It was partway open. She paused, looking at it uncertainly. “Wasn’t this door closed just a few minutes ago?” she said to herself.
“What did you say?” said Rick as he grabbed the bags off the top of the van and started to carry them back up to the house.